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Costs

We hope to keep a detailed record of our daily spending as best we can to see where all the money goes, and maybe put together some pie charts! Everybody loves pie charts!

Notes:

All figures are in Canadian dollars unless otherwise indicated. The amounts represent the final cost paid after taxes, foreign exchange, credit card fees, etc.

Certain things such as car rentals are cheaper per person since there are two people sharing the costs.

“Original Currency” amounts are per person.

Last updated: May 20, 2013 (Julie’s note: You may or may not have noticed that I’m getting behind/lazy with the details here. It’s been much harder than expected to keep this up to date! I will continue to work on it, but please excuse the shortcuts in the mean time.)

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15 responses to “Costs”

Nope, we looked into it but it turned out to be too restrictive… We would have had to have booked all our flights in advance, and travel in one direction only with no back tracking, even over land segments. I’m sure a RTW ticket is good for some people, but we were intent on keeping our plans open ended.

Yes it is expensive… Pretty much half of our budget for the year is flights/transportation. I believe BootsnAll.com did a good comparison of rtw tix vs. buying tix individually (and a bunch of other related articles that we found to be good reading)

Thanks for directing me to their site. I am also planning on traveling the world, for about a year, but was wondering if a RTW ticket would work for me as I do not want to visit every continent (leave Europe and Africa out)…. I am thinking that 10k (US Dollars) should cover both tickets and accomodation for 1 year.

That sounds like a sweet trip!
In our experience, 10k USD for both transport & accommodation wouldn’t have been enough, and we are trying to stay in dorm hostels as much as possible, and cheaper ‘guesthouse’ type places in cheaper countries.
If you can only do 10k, I’d suggest steering clear of at least Australia, because their currency is so strong right now and costs for everything there are astronomical.
Even New Zealand was quite expensive, but at least their currency (compared to USD/CAD was slightly weaker).
Good luck!

I think a working holiday would be a great way to offset costs!
Julie and I have considered doing that, but we didn’t bother looking into it too seriously yet as the visa situation appeared to get more complicated if we wanted to work (legally;).
Let me know how it goes, because we may need to work eventually in order to sustain our trip or at least get our ticket home:p

A working holiday in Oz and NZ would be great! We met a lot of people who were doing that, especially hostel staff. But we also met a lot of people who struggled to find work, so maybe be prepared for that too.

When we looked at RTW tickets, there was a cap to the distance you can travel, and you have to factor in the distance you would travel overland too. Star Alliance (I think the largest provider of RTW tickets) allowed a maximum of 39,000 miles (including overland travel), 15 stopovers, and 5 “non-air” segments – as in 5 overland or water travel. http://www.staralliance.com/en/fares/round-the-world-fare/round-the-world-fare-tc/.

It all got really complicated and confusing. As Adam said, we really wanted our trip to be flexible, so we didn’t want to have everything planned out. We had a rough idea of the route we wanted to take, but we wanted to be able to change our plans on a whim if we felt like it. Add or skip some countries, stay longer/shorter, etc.

As a penny pincher, it was really hard for me to opt for the more expensive approach, but flexibility ended up being more important.

Did you buy the tickets at the airport then? :O Or did you still go online and plan your flights months ahead? I’m thinking of doing a trip with nothing planned, but I’m worried that last minute airport sales may be very expensive.

Your flights don’t seem expensive at all (other than the ones to and from Canada, of course)! Did you buy the tickets day-of at the airport or did you still plan a couple of days ahead and buy online? I’m worried that buying it at the airport, or even a couple of days ahead would be really expensive.

Hi Kelly!
We didn’t book any of our flights at the airport.
We used skyscanner a lot to see when the cheapest flights were, and since we had such a flexible schedule we were able to select them and buy online a week or two or a few days in advance.
Last minute at the airport would be quite an interesting way to buy tickets, but we didn’t have the guts to try that (on this trip).
Air Asia had some very inexpensive flights that were even cheaper when they were offered at limited time promotional rates (gotta keep an eye on their website for the ones you want, because they sell out quite fast).
Don’t worry too much (unless you have a very rigid schedule :$), because even if the flight you think you want is too expensive, you can widen your search to include other destinations that could be much cheaper.
That way you can end up places you didn’t even know you wanted to go!
It happened to us a couple times and we were glad we went each time.
Let us know how your trip planning goes 🙂